Tanish Dhillon
Four years ago, DVI Group’s management team sat down for what should have been a routine meeting. Sales, finance, delivery and customer service each brought a spreadsheet tracking the company’s live contracts. Each spreadsheet carried a different number.
“It was shocking,” recalls Tanish Dhillon, General Manager at the Singapore-headquartered audio-visual (AV) integrator. “How are we running a business? We don’t even have a number.”
The question stung more because of who DVI was serving: Fortune 500 companies that expect their suppliers to know, at the very least, what they have sold.
The pandemic boom that broke the back office
DVI, founded in 2002, designs, installs and maintains the meeting-room technology behind Microsoft Teams Rooms, Zoom Rooms and Cisco Webex. Before COVID-19, Dhillon says, a typical office had one or two rooms equipped for video calls. Afterwards, that number could jump to 100 or 200.
The company rode the wave hard. In roughly three years, it grew to 10 offices and about 300 staff across markets including Singapore, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan and China.
Growth came at a familiar cost. Each new office was set up, staffed and largely left to run on its own terms. Singapore ran a legacy ERP. Other subsidiaries used whatever was to hand, from QuickBooks to Xero. Dhillon counts about eight different systems across the 10 offices.
“When you have such rapid growth, the first thing that falls apart is your processes,” he told e27 on the sidelines of SuiteWorld 2026 in Las Vegas. SuiteWorld is Oracle NetSuite’s annual customer conference. DVI is a NetSuite customer.
A detour via Barcelona
Dhillon’s team was tasked with finding a replacement and evaluated the usual suspects: SAGE 300, SAP and Microsoft Dynamics. The eventual pick did not come from a formal tender. It came from conversations at an industry convention in Barcelona, where peers in Europe and the US described what they were running.
For a company spread across a dozen jurisdictions, the deciding criterion was flexibility in finance. Multinational clients want one standardised way of working; tax authorities want anything but. Dhillon points to India, where tax stacks up across several levels of government and is calculated to three decimal places. Get it wrong, and you are back in front of the authorities.
The company’s motto, “local presence, global standard”, captures the tension. Processes stay uniform; the books bend to each market. It is the same compliance patchwork that every cloud ERP is now selling against, and the reason so many regional firms still pay the hidden cost of cheap ERP implementations.
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Yet the hardest part of consolidation, Dhillon insists, was neither tax nor process. It was people. Every office had a champion for its own tool. “We need to have a system that works for everybody,” he recalls telling them. Anyone who has run a business built by bolting on subsidiaries will recognise that conversation.
Five copies of one warehouse
The spreadsheet problem was sharpest in inventory. The technical team, sales, management, finance and the warehouse each kept their own copy of stock. When an engineer pulled a unit, sales did not know. Small deviations compounded until management was staring at a gap of around US$100,000 and one question: where is the money going?
DVI bolted a warehouse management module onto the new system. Under the old procedure, the company ran four separate stock counts. This time it completed one in a single weekend and hit 80 per cent accuracy the following week, the first time it had reached that level. Dhillon says it has held since.
For DVI, that is a big jump. It also means roughly one in five stock records is still wrong, in a business where a single gap once ran to six figures. That remaining fifth is the real test.
“Who owes us money?”
Asked what he could not answer before, Dhillon does not hesitate: who owed the company money. Receivables were reviewed by printing A3 sheets roughly every six months and going through them line by line.
Today, DVI pipes data from its various systems into a central analytics warehouse. Dhillon says this shows him how customers buy, which products are falling away and where markets are moving. Because DVI is brand-agnostic, the data also decides where it sends engineers for certification when a vendor’s products start selling faster.
It has sharpened DVI’s hand with suppliers, too. If a client buys 100 units in January and another 100 in July, DVI can now ask why its price has not improved. Dhillon insists margin visibility does not change which brands it recommends. “Your requirements come first,” he says. Still, clients on tight budgets will see models chosen with margin in mind.
He claims the system paid for itself within three months. Part of that is because almost anything beats spreadsheets. Part of it is because one set of numbers gave management the nerve for strategic decisions “we were scared to do”. Payback claims like this are common currency at vendor conferences, and this one is hard to audit from the outside. Indirect gains rarely come with a receipt.
The sandbox slip
DVI is now experimenting with AI on top of that data. Its service team pulls device-health telemetry, such as memory and CPU load, from client rooms to flag equipment drifting from benchmarks, so engineers can call before a room fails. With hundreds of rooms in a single building and 10 countries to cover, Dhillon says no human team could watch it all.
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Finance is testing in-house agents for accounts receivable: chasing customers on billing and following up on payments. Communication is the AR team’s heaviest burden, he says, and automating it could free about 30 per cent of their time. It is part of a wider bet that the next AI payments boom happens in the back office.
Not every experiment has gone smoothly. The finance team connected Anthropic’s Claude to the company’s ERP through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard for plugging AI models into business software. A month-long report came back wrong. The culprit was not hallucination. The AI had queried the sandbox instead of the live system.
Dhillon calls it funny rather than disastrous. It is also a neat illustration of the hidden risks of agentic AI and MCP: the model did exactly what it was pointed at. Customers, he says, are “cautiously optimistic” about AI. That is roughly where DVI sits, and it is why governance has to come before scale.
Rivals and the managed-services pivot
DVI competes with regional integrators such as Vega Global and global players such as AVI-SPL and Diversified. As Microsoft and Zoom certify standard room kits, the hardware becomes interchangeable and the integrator has to earn its keep elsewhere.
Dhillon’s answer is managed services. That once meant fixing broken rooms. Now it means telling clients that a room for eight routinely hosts two, or that an expensive wireless-sharing system sits unused. Hybrid-room demand has cooled from its pandemic peak because most clients have already retrofitted, he concedes. Even so, as companies rethink their office footprints, teams in one office still need to meet colleagues in another.
Five-day quotes, and staying in Asia
US-China trade tensions have hit DVI as they have everyone weighing tariff and supply risks. A supplier quotation, Dhillon says, can be invalid within five days. So DVI is shifting from buying on customer order to buying ahead, using 12 months of purchase data to decide what to stock. It is a bet that its data can predict demand faster than tariffs move prices, and with one in five stock records still off, it is not a small bet.
Five years out, he expects AI that captures in-room conversations and takes notes to make today’s meeting room look as dated as an overhead projector. “Every room today can see you and hear you,” he says. “But how many of them are actually listening?”
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DVI has no plans to chase the US or Europe, which he sees as mature. Asia’s diverse but similar markets are growing fast enough, and he singles out the Philippines. The priority, he says, is to “make sure our processes are really the best they can be before we start extending to other continents”.
Four years after the meeting with four spreadsheets, that may be the most telling line. DVI’s growth was never the problem. Knowing what it had grown into was.
The post Eight systems, one number: How DVI Group fixed the back office its pandemic boom broke appeared first on e27.